Commentary.

Cold War Triumph's Star Was The Pope, Not Reagan's Star Wars

April 30, 2000|By David Warsh, The Boston Globe.

Why did the Cold War end the way it did, with capitalism triumphant globally? Many, many years will pass before an integrated and widely shared understanding begins to emerge of the events that culminated in the miracle year of 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down: the spread of global markets, the collapse of communism and various right-wing dictatorships, and the subsequent revolution in computers and telecommunications.

"Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War," by Frances Fitzgerald, is a carefully focused examination of the politics that led in the early 1980s to a burst of spending in the United States on laser-powered antimissile weapons.

"Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II" is a meticulous chronicle of the tumultuous events in the 1980s at whose center was the Polish pope: the end of Soviet hegemony over the world's last great political empire, not just Eastern Europe but the larger sphere of Soviet influence throughout the world.

Fitzgerald is out to demonstrate the shortcomings of a frequent conservative claim: that the Americans spent the Soviets into a ditch in a high-tech game of chicken, especially after Ronald Reagan's famous "Star Wars" speech of 1983. Two years later Reagan delivered to Congress a new proposal for a "Strategic Defense Initiative." Seed funding for an elaborate missile defense system requiring dozens of space-based laser cannons was set at about $25 billion for five years. By the end of that time, the program had begun to collapse in a welter of technological difficulties and embarrassing choices. But then so had the Soviet Union.

By 1986, . summit diplomacy, not confrontation, had become the rule in the administration. Most important, Reagan had agreed to meet Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the autumn of 1986, for what turned out to be a momentous summit. Reykjavik defined the Reagan presidency's ultimate willingness to accept yes for an answer--and set the stage for what was to come next.

That story is related in moving terms in "Witness to Hope." George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Roman Catholic theologian. He has enjoyed close access to John Paul II throughout his papacy.

Born Karol Wojtyla in 1920, John Paul learned early about life in the underground. Germany invaded Poland in 1939, just as he completed military training. He was accepted as a clandestine seminarian in 1942; he was hit by a German truck in 1944 and hospitalized; a fellow seminarian was arrested about the same time by the Gestapo and shot. The Soviet occupation of Poland followed in 1945. When he was elected pope in 1978, practically everyone was surprised. "Witness to Hope" is one of the most interesting histories of our times that I have picked up in years--precisely because it doesn't treat Washington, D.C., as the center of the world. Decades of sharing authority with the communists in Poland had given John Paul II an exquisite sense of the balance between what Weigel calls "the limits of politics and the promise of redemption." He interposed himself in troubled situations around the world--Nicaragua in 1983, Czechoslovakia in 1986, Paraguay in 1988, Cuba in 1998, the situation in Poland throughout--with great success. The pope has never permitted himself the kind of blunt talk in which biographer Weigel occasionally indulges, but there cannot be much doubt after reading "Witness to Hope" that he had far more to do with bringing the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion than all of the braggadocio of Star Wars.